Not to be outdone by NVIDIA and Tegra Zone, this morning Qualcomm introduced its own video game showcase product, called Snapdragon Game Pack. As we’ve seen recently, Qualcomm is going on the offensive against competitors, and the release of Snapdragon Game Pack is just an extension of that. The company really wants you to know that Snapdragon-powered devices are still best in class when it comes to performance.

The goal of Snapdragon Game Pack is to highlight those Android games that have been optimized to run on the Snapdragon platform. Initially, the service will launch with more than 100 games from video game studios like Babaroga, Booyah, Com2us USA, Digital Chocolate, Eyelead Software, Glu, Guild Software, NAMCO BANDAI Games America, Gameloft, Natural Motion, Polarbit, Southend Interactive and Tripwire Interactive.

Qualcomm will provide game developers with a set of tools that will allow them to get the most out of a Snapdragon chip. One of those tools is Qualcomm’s Adreno Profiler, which lets developers fine-tune the 3D performance of their Android games on the Snapdragon platform.

Although details are bit scarce at the moment, it’s likely that Snapdragon Game Pack will consist of an Android app for phones and tablets. We don’t know yet if you’ll be able to download Snapdragon Game Pack from the Market, but Qualcomm hinted at the possibility of having the app pre-loaded on some Android devices.

As companies like Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Marvell, and even Intel continue to fight for mobile chip supremacy, you can expect these kind of strategies to continue. Who knows? Maybe in the future phones will have stickers that say “Snapdragon Inside”, and we’ll even have Qualcomm and NVIDIA fanboys. Oh, the joy!

Alberto is a college student living somewhere between Miami, Sarasota and the World Wide Web. Although a former iPhone owner, Alberto is now a proud Android enthusiast. You can follow Alberto on Twitter and Google+ for his thoughts unworthy of an article.

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http://Website Ankit

Great so another level of fragmentation. Now in addition to OS version on the phone, I have to look at the processor to run certain apps. Google needs to do something about this. Games need to be universally compatible

Alberto Vildosola

I don’t think these games will only run on Snapdragon-powered devices. They’re just optimized for it.

The same thing happens in the PC world, some games are optimized for NVIDIA and others for ATI, but they run fine on both.

http://Website Carl

Developers can and should exclude devices that are not supported so you’ll never even see the apps in the Market. Qualcomm is simply encouraging devs to take advantage of their tools and hardware. Any Android dev worth anything will simply make fallback experiences for less capable devices or again, exclude them from Market accessibility. Also, a ton of devices are running on Qualcomm tech unlike NVIDIA chipsets which are still pretty scarce.

http://Website David M

Ok my question is, will games optimized for Snapdragon be restricted to just Snapdragon processors? I mean I can see that happening today with Nvidia’s Tegra Zone being available only to Tegra 2.

http://Website metafor

The OpenGL API for Adreno is fairly standard. There’s really only a handful of function calls that are Adreno-specific and those aren’t really very useful ones except for debugging. I would venture to say most of these games should (unless they’re artificially crippled) work on any other OpenGL supporting platform and will likely be fairly optimized for PowerVR as well as they both share the tile-based architecture.

Of course, if they decide to purposely exclude other chipsets like nVidia does, we’ll just have a mess.

http://Website Randy khoo

Say who?
I can run dungeon defenders on non-tegra 2 devices.
As long as it meets the hardware requirements, it’s fine.
It’s just like a normal PC, if you can’t meet certain hardware specs, you can’t run certain things.
You have a bit of misinformation there friend.

GuniGuGu

Gotta agree… this is becoming quite annoying.

I purchased the SGS2 based on the fact it’s probably the fastest phone and gpu you can buy… but what’s the point if you can’t play any games…